OTTAWA — Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq won’t say whether she’s ready to accept the advice of her own expert panel on energy drinks to classify the caffeinated beverages as drugs and sell them at pharmacies, saying she first needs to be assured the science is right and the report is balanced.

“This is why it’s important to take the time to review the recommendations, to see if it’s balanced, is it on science, number of other things,” Aglukkaq told Postmedia News.”

“We want to get this right and when we do go forward that we’ve had due diligence in going through the recommendations in detail.”

The panel’s report, provided to Health Canada last November and obtained by Postmedia News last week, says such energy drinks as Red Bull, Rockstar and Monster should be renamed “stimulant drug containing drinks’’ and be sold only under the direct supervision of a pharmacist instead of on grocery store shelves.

The panel says warnings labels should also appear on cans stating that serious adverse events — including death — have been seen with these products, possibly due to cardiac events.

If the key recommendations are accepted, Canada would face the wrath of the industry and have to defend an international precedent for regulating energy drinks on the world stage. If the recommendations are rejected, Health Canada would face criticism from some public-health advocates for tossing out the advice of its own expert panel.

Aglukkaq said people won’t have to wait much longer for the government’s response to the panel, comprised of Canadian specialists in cardiology, pediatrics, pharmacology and kinesiology who conferred with a doctor specializing in pharmacovigilance at the World Health Organization and three experts at the European Food Safety Authority before formulating the recommendations.

“Within a short little while, I’ll be going out to make an announcement on what we’ll be doing to respond to that,” said Aglukkaq, who was first briefed on the panel’s report on Nov. 23, 2010.

Even before Health Canada convened the expert panel last fall, the department flagged health concerns over the caffeinated beverages, especially for children and teens, and considered taking some drastic measures. These included stop-sale orders and possible product recalls, according to 2010 internal records.

Unlike sports drinks, which contain electrolytes, energy drinks are boosted with caffeine to levels far higher than those in a can of cola. Though formulated for adults, they’re popular among teenagers.

The elevated caffeine content in the drinks, which are currently regulated as natural health products, allows companies to make a health claim that Red Bull and other similar drinks provide an energy boost.

Health Canada had also planned to announce new cautionary labelling rules by March 2010, requiring energy drink makers to add a risk statement on cans: “Irregular heart rate or rhythm have been known to occur, in which case discontinue use and consult a health care practitioner.” (Companies are already required to state on cans sold in Canada that the drink is not recommended for children, pregnant or breastfeeding women and caffeine-sensitive persons and that it is not to be mixed with alcohol.)

The labelling proposal, considered alternately as “high priority” and “extremely high priority” in internal correspondence, stalled after the industry group questioned the scientific basis for the cardiac statement.

But now that Health Canada’s expert panel has weighed in on this labelling issue and the question of drug classification, Jim Shepherd hopes Aglukkaq will accept the advice of the expert panel.

“I’m ecstatic that a group of experts in their field studied all of the information that Health Canada could gather from around the world, and they came up with very strong but necessary recommendations that do address the awareness issue and the safety of youth,” said Shepherd, whose 15-year old son, Brian, died in January 2008 after competing in a daylong paintball tournament in Toronto where a Red Bull representative was handing out samples of energy drinks.

Witnesses reported seeing Brian drink one of the samples during the company’s noon hour visit. Around 7:20 p.m., while waiting for the awards ceremony, Brian collapsed and later died in hospital.

The coroner ascribed Brian’s death clinically to Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome, but offered no plausible explanation for the cause of that arrhythmia, given the boy had no genetic markers demonstrating a pre-disposition to an arrhythmic event.

Health Canada reviewed Shepherd’s adverse reaction case, but concluded it was “unclassifiable” because “the time and amount of Red Bull ingested could not be confirmed.”

The expert panel cites Brian’s case in its report, saying: “Two deaths (albeit, so far, unassessable due to limited information), have occurred, and deaths have been reported in other jurisdictions. In order for adults in the general public to make an informed choice on whether to consume or not consume a stimulant drug containing drink, it will require not only accurate and fulsome labelling on the products but also a public education program about stimulant drug containing drinks.”